Unfee'd, the calls of nature she obeys, Friend of distress! the mourner feels thy aid; But who this child of weakness, want and care? If present, railing, till he saw her pained; THE APPROACH OF OLD AGE. Six years had passed, and forty ere the six, Locks of pure brown, displayed the encroaching white; The blood, once fervid, now to cool began, And time's strong pressure to subdue the man. I rode or walked as I was wont before, And new dislike to forms and fashions new. I numbered peaches, looked how stocks arose, CONTRADICTORY readings may be taken of Byron's character and achievements, and each of them be largely true. That he owned true genius, brilliant and forceful, is indisputable, and yet he would trail it in the mire for the sake of a cynical laugh. No poet was moved by intenser passion for the good and the beautiful, and none so lightly prostituted it to baser ends. His heart beat ardently with generous, noble, and even self-sacrificing impulses; yet it could harden at will into adamantine selfishness, morose hatred of his species, expressed in brutish acts. Byron's poetry is Byron himself, thoroughly romantic, dazzlingly bright and beautiful when soaring free above the contaminations of the sodden camping ground, and proportionately morbid and miserable as he sinks by his own weight to that malarious level. George Noel Gordon Byron was born in London in 1788. His profligate father, known as "Mad Jack Byron" of the Guards, after wasting his wife's fortune, deserted her, and died, leaving mother and child with only a small fixed income of about 120 a year. Mrs. Byron was a passionate creature, caressing the beautiful, little lame boy one moment, and beating him the next. At the age of ten Byron inherited his title from a grand-uncle, William, Lord Byron, with the encumbered estate of Newstead Abbey. He went to Harrow and to Cambridge, but was, in both places, an idle and irregular student, refusing to pursue the usual studies of the college curriculum; but reading English literature and every history he could lay his hands on, in the intervals of riding, fencing, boxing, drinking, gaming and the like. He scribbled verses while at Harrow, and in 1807 pubTished a little book of mediocre poems called "Hours of Idleness." The Edinburgh Review scored this with a stinging criticism; and Byron dashed back, in an outburst of rage, his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." Some notion of his violent young prejudices may be formed from the fact, that he speaks in it of Scott as a "hireling lord," of Coleridge, "to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear," and of "vulgar Words worth." From his earliest years the poet had been passionate, affectionate and moody. He quarreled violently with his mother until her death-just after his return to England from his travels. In London he lived the life of a man about town, a poor lord, with "coffee-house companions," and perhaps three intimates-the poets Moore, Campbell and Rogers. At twenty-one he could hardly find any one to introduce him to the House of Lords, where he took his seat by right of birth. He was perhaps not worse than many young men of his age and rank; but solitary and forlorn, he was without home, without relations, almost without friends—a sort of social pariah. In 1809 Byron, deeply wounded and despondent, left home and traveled through Spain, Albania, Greece, Turkey and Asia Minor. On his return he published the first two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," and "awoke one morning to find himself famous." The success of this poem flashing, like a comet across the horizon, depended not more on the easy and sustained fluency of its descriptions, than on the fact of its picturing scenes and countries then almost unknown and unvisited. Besides which it contains the personal heartache of a mysterious young sufferer and outcast; and for Childe Harold the public easily read Childe Byron. After the triumphant success of "Childe Harold," every door in England was thrown open to the noble author. He was courted by great men and good women. His genius dazzled; his pure, pale, melancholy, sculpturesque face won and endeared him; his sweet voice, and gentle manners, and graceful form-spite of a slight lameness-attracted every eye. He was courted, flattered, idolized; and pushed, breathlessly, by his admirers to the giddiest pinnacle of the Temple of Fame. During this period, amid all the frivolousness and hurry of fashionable life, Byron found time to pour forth some of his most matchless strains: "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," "Lara," "The Siege of Corinth" and "Parisina." One hero stalks through them all: "The man of loneliness and mystery, Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh." Young England became enamored of light dark curls, a scowling brow, low rolling collars, and melancholy. Many gentle hearts yearned for the poet's love, and one, Lady Caroline Lamb's, is said to have been broken. This unhealthy dream lasted four years. Then Byron married Miss Milbanke, an heiress. A daughter was born, named Ada, whose son, Lord Lovelace, still lives in England. Lady Byron left her husband within a year, no one really knows why, though many vain guesses have been made. The wife told her physician she thought her husband mad. The world took sides, and Byron left England forever; his subsequent career justifying the worst suspicions of his worst enemies. He resided, for a little while, in Geneva, with Shelley, Mary Godwin, and her step-sister, Jane Clermont. The latter's child, Allegra, whose father was Lord Byron, was supported for some years by Shelley; as was its mother. The poor little waif died early. The poet passed on to Venice, and London believed that he had a harem there. In Ravenna he lived with the young and beautiful Countess Guiccioli. Her husband was separated from her; and, Italian fashion, the father and brother resided in one end of a great palace, with the daughter and her lover at the other. While in Ravenna, living in comparative tranquillity, Byron wrote several new works; among others, Cain," "A Vision of Judgment," his dramas and the pas sionate, witty, original, and rakish "Don Juan." "Childe Harold" had been completed in Switzerland. There, too, he wrote "The Prisoner of Chillor." By this time, at the age of thirty-six, he had exhausted everything; hope, of which he had but little store; fame, pleasure, most of his fortune; even the springs of his genius, the contemplation and expression of his own wounded selflove. In 1823 he set sail for Greece, hoping to aid her in her struggle for independence; and he died of fever in Missolonghi, in 1824, disenchanted at the last; for "instead of patriotism he found fraud and confusion, a military mob, and contending chiefs." Byron's body was interred near Newstead Abbey, amid England's sobs of grief. The poet's verse is forceful, splendid, glowing and sustained; but the enchantment of it, in his generation, lay in this: Byron had a romantic story to tell, and the world identified him with his one hero, posing under different names-Harold, Conrad, Lara, Manfred. "Every replica was received with acclamation; and in the full illumination of the nineteenth century the sham-heroic pirate chief was, to them, a revelation from heaven." Byron the poet had genius, fire, force, strength, ease and headlong passion. Byron the man had an aching heart that loved to make other hearts ache. He was without conscience, without shame, without a sense of responsibility to God and man. that he has written will always be admired and remembered; some of it will be pestilence-breeding to the end. GREECE IN HER DECAY. (From the "Giaour.") HE who hath bent him o'er the dead, Ere the first day of death is fled The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress, (Before Decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers), And marked the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there: The fixed yet tender traits that streak The languor of that placid cheek, Appalls the gazing mourner's heart, Much |